Scott Thill: Thanks for taking time out to talk to me. I know you're a busy man.

David Lynch: No problem, Scott.

ST: Also, I'd like to tell you that you're one of my favorite directors, if not the outright favorite.

Lynch: Thank you very much, pal.

ST: Back when you started DavidLynch.com, you said the internet was still "sleepy" and slow. But now with a few years under your belt, has the sleeper, to quote Dune, awakened yet?

Lynch: The sleeper hasn't awakened yet. It's weird. Obviously, the internet is huge and getting bigger, but it is divided. Right now, everything is getting divided. Divided, divided and more divided. And I guess MySpace is the place where people go now, but even that's divided, know what I mean? But over here, we've got our thinking caps strapped on. We've got a great bunch in our membership who all really like each other and find things to talk about. And when we get new members, they really like the site and say that it's different from other sites.

I guess our job is just to keep going. It's all an experiment. I want to find things that fire me up, and see if it works for the people. I'm really interested in my bird feeders, and those are down right now. But we're going to come back with new and improved bird feeders. The technology has improved, so we should have better live pictures. And it's coming up to springtime now, Scott, so the birds will be with us.

ST: How do you feel taking your work onto the internet years ago has changed you as a filmmaker?

Lynch: Well, it's huge, because I like to conduct experiments. There are only 24 hours in a day, and my top priority is working on my films, but I love short film experiments. And because of the internet I've learned about After Effects, Flash animation and discovered and fallen in love with digital video. So I just think that going onto the web was so good for me. It's just sort of starting, but it's a beautiful world. A beautiful, modern world, and getting better. I always like random access, and I like the idea that one thing relates to another. And this is part of the internet: It's so huge, that it is really an unbounded world. And I think that if we keep our thinking caps strapped on, we could find something beautiful out there in the ether.

ST: You're saying the net is being divided up. What do you mean by that?

Lynch: Well, everybody has a site or a page of their own. Everyone is on the internet but they're not all talking with each other. There are groups upon groups out there, but they don't talk to one another. So while the internet brings everyone into a shared space, it does not necessarily bring them together. And there's just something I like about bringing people together.

ST: Do you feel that your site has brought what used to be a bunch of scattered Lynch communities together?

Lynch: In a way. Because it's a membership site, it costs money to join, which keeps a lot of people away. They've got other things to spend their money on. So we've talked about making it a free site with advertising, provided we can get some really good advertisers involved. I think that's possible, but the membership is really a good bunch. It's spawned at least one marriage, and brought people from all over the world into one place to talk, make friends and more.

ST: Is there a fear that going with a free site may fragment that community somewhat?

Lynch: I always want to keep at least a membership chat room up and running, so that people can be with a smaller group of friends. But I think that opening it up, in some cases, might be a better way to go. So we're thinking about it.

ST: How has the site enabled you, if at all, to strengthen your creative control over your work?

Lynch: Well, I believe in creative control. No matter what anyone makes, they should have control over it. See, I was a painter first, and there's zero problem with control in that world. An artist makes a painting, and nobody bugs him or her about it. It's just you and your painting. To me, that's the way it should be with film as well. But you need a crew, you have to build a tight-knit machine that goes beautifully down the road together, and you've gotta keep control otherwise the whole thing won't hold together.

The business side of film has goofed up so many things, but even that's changing. It happened to the music industry and now it's happening to the film studios. It's crazy what's going on. But artists should have control of their work; especially if, as I always say, you never turn down a good idea and never take a bad idea. You have to have control over every element of a film and not walk away until everything feels correct.

ST: Was taking your work to the site one way of counteracting that business side of the film industry that keeps screwing everything up?

Lynch: No, I wouldn't do it for reasons like that. Websites are places where we can all go and, although perhaps no one will see it, at least put out our work, whether it's high-quality still and moving images or sound and music. I can create, finesse and post these short works, and it's a beautiful thing. And where else could you do that? You can't book theaters for short films or experimental cinema, because it would cost a fortune. The internet and its technology are there for everyone, and the price for the equipment is becoming more and more reasonable. It's a great place to be creative.

ST: And digital video seems to have made the whole process of filmmaking easier for budding auteurs.

Lynch: Digital video is so beautiful. It's lightweight, modern, and it's only getting better. It's put film into the La Brea Tar Pits.

ST: So you are serious about working exclusively in DV from here on out?

Lynch: For sure.

ST: Because of its mobility and lower overhead?

Lynch: Everything about it. In one word, film is heavy. It's gone, just gone.

ST: DV is a much easier route for new filmmakers to get their work seen, rather than have to rely on film festivals and the like.

Lynch: Absolutely. Like I always say, everybody has access to a piece of paper and a pencil. You can write a story with it. Anyone in the world can do that. And more and more these days, anyone in the world can make a film. There aren't that many great stories out there -- there's a bunch, maybe -- but at least now people have access where they didn't before. Films used to cost a fortune to make.

ST: You started a paid subscriber site when the dot-com world had pretty much gone bust.

Lynch:It was already busted by the time we went up.

ST: Did it pay off for you?

Lynch: Yes. We've got such good members, but the question is would it be better to open it up and go with advertising. That's the question we've been asking.

ST: Well, the cycle seems to have come around again. Advertisers are dropping millions into the internet.

Lynch: Yeah, because everyone is still on the internet. But advertisers are not going to give away any money without getting results.

ST: So what else is in store for the site, save for a free portal with ads? Eric (Bassett, DavidLynch.com's managing consultant) told me that you had envisioned it as becoming its own media or broadcast entity.

Lynch: Well, Eric says a lot of things! (Laughs). I love him and he's always thinking. But it's a lot of work to make one piece of new content, especially when I am in the middle of making of film, like I am right now. So the idea was, if the site went wide, that people would have the opportunity to submit short films to the site and see what happens. We're considering having contests of that sort to showcase good, new short films. That's mostly because it's a short-film platform right now, but pretty soon it will be a feature-film platform.

ST: I agree. Theoretically speaking, a director of your following could finance, produce, create and distribute a feature film exclusively through your site. Is that a possibility for you?

Lynch:It's going to be that way. Right now, it's that way for music and it will be that way with film as soon as tomorrow. For sure.

ST: Do you have a project in mind for that eventuality?

Lynch: Well, I wouldn't distribute it strictly through my site, but definitely the internet. Satellites will also be squirting films onto the big screens from space, or so I hear. But it's no longer going to be a world where trucks carry cans of film around anymore.

ST: Well, I would imagine that a free DavidLynch.com site allowing new filmmakers to submit their work to the site for you to judge or critique would generate an enormous response.

Lynch: That would be good. People are out there working away, and they always were, but they don't yet really have a place to show their stuff. Nor do they have anyone saying, "I think this is really good, take a look at it." It's a possibility.

ST: What about some of the other projects I hear you have in the works?

Lynch: Well, we got ringtones. And the bird feeders are going to go back up. I like seeing the dynamics between the birds and the squirrels, so I think that'll be big. But back to ringtones; they kind of had their 15 seconds of fame. (Laughs). But they are important to have, and we've got some good ones coming up very soon. We're all ready to go right now; it's just all about settling the contractual details.

ST: How about the intellectual property issues? You're into creative control, but the digital world is an eminently easier one to hack and steal from. Are you worried about that?

Lynch: Everybody would like it if people respected the work of others. But there is a lot of ... I think things need to be balanced out. For sure, there are pirates out there who just want to do it to do it, but when you download something and really appreciate it, you should send something to the person who made it.

ST: You have to support the artists or works you really admire.

Lynch: I think that that would be good.

ST: Can that ideal survive in the digital world?

Lynch: Yeah, I think so. Of course, it all depends; you have to go person by person. But a lot of people feel the way you do.

ST: Well, it makes philosophical and economical sense.

Lynch: For example, a lot of people decide to download music, but rather than buy it they decide instead to support the band by going to see them on tour. But if you're not a touring band, you're fresh out of luck. That's your only source of revenue and people are taking it. But it's better to change people's thinking, because right now they're going to do it if they're going to do it. There aren't any rules and people can hack into anything. You have to go person by person.

ST: Has the work you've done for Lynch.com helped support Inland Empire?

Lynch: For sure. And people who appreciate the work know the deal. Many times I've been told that so-and-so has my work up on their site or selling it somewhere on the internet, but things travel fast. If people are with you, it's a beautiful world. It's in the ether, but it's real.

ST: What was the experience of shooting Inland Empire in DV like?

Lynch: I'm telling you Scott, it's a new world. The quality is pretty terrible, but I like that. It reminds me of the early days of 35 mm, when there wasn't so much information in the frame or emulsion. But the human being is a beautiful creature; you act and react, and the medium starts talking to you. So I love working in digital video. High-def is a little bit too information to me.

ST: A little too clean.

Lynch: Yeah, but the thing is, in the modern world, you can degrade it. You can do anything you want with it. So it's just that much more control for the filmmaker.

ST: How did the actors respond to it? Did it make a difference to them?

Lynch: It makes a difference, because you've got a 40-minute take rather than a 10-minute take, so you can just keep on rolling. In my last couple of films, I've started talking to the actors while we're shooting, which is not the smartest thing to do in a way. (Laughs). Because you're goofing up the soundtrack. But I like to talk, and with DV, it's not like millions of dollars are flying through the camera every second. It's a different kind of feeling. You can get into a mood and stay there without breaking it because you have to stop and reload. This is money in the bank. This is getting in there, and it's very beautiful and important.

ST: It's more like guerilla filmmaking.

Lynch: For sure. You're leaner and meaner, and you can get more good footage.

ST: So is DV a foregone conclusion for the film industry?

Lynch: It's think it's a foregone conclusion. I love the quality, feel and history of film. I love the pictures of the giant cameras and the way it was. But it was slow. It was so slow that it would kill you. And now there's no going back.

ST: On to Inland Empire, which I know nothing about and don't really want to know, since I love to be surprised at your films.

Lynch: Good, because I wouldn't tell you anyway.

ST: And then there's that. But you've been a resident of Los Angeles for awhile now, and your last film dealt with the city and its mythology in at least a peripheral manner, just as Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet did with the Pacific Northwest. Do you find that the region inspires you to build films about it, or are these films already in your head and the setting irrelevant?

Lynch: It's both, really. Every place is rich and fertile, but I love Los Angeles. People try to find a place that speaks to them, and that's for me, that's L.A.

ST: Do you find that Hollywood, the real and hyperreal environment, is buckling under the weight of the digital realm?

Lynch: It already has, but things change all the time. We live in a world of change. If I were the studios right now, I would be sweating bullets.

ST: Speaking of, when is the DVD for season two of Twin Peaks coming out? It's been forever since the first box set dropped.

Lynch: I think we're going to do the 5.1 mix for the next season, which means we haven't done it yet, which also means that the DVD won't be coming out soon. I don't know what's going on with the pilot, but it's so absurd that the pilot hasn't been brought up. It's crazy. This is all the world of business, and I don't really know about that.

ST: Is it the same world creating problems for the DVD for Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me that includes the deleted scenes that your fans have been campaigning for over the last few years?

Lynch: Scott, because I know what it's done for me. I meditate every day, and I have for 32 years. And it's a long topic, but there's a thing called consciousness, and though consciousness is pretty abstract, it is also the ability to understand. It's awareness, it's wakefulness and it's bliss. Extreme happiness. It's intelligence, creativity, love and peace.

Consciousness is the "I am"-ness, the self. Of course, everybody has consciousness; we know we exist. But everyone doesn't know that you can achieve more consciousness. There's an unbounded, infinite ocean of it within every human being. You just need the technique to dive within and get wet with it.

When you really and truly experience pure consciousness, when you transcend and experience the ultimate reality, it starts to grow. Then you've got more happiness, creativity and ability to understand the complexities of life. It's very important for a filmmaker, it's very important for a human being. But nobody really knows about it; we're not taught about it in schools. And people are in trouble: They're filled with fear, anxiety and stress. And this clears it all up. When you ramp up the light of consciousness, just like darkness clearing the way for sunlight, negativity starts to recede. Fear and pressures begin to lift, and you're free to do your work, to get more enjoyment out of it. It's beautiful, that's how come I do it. When you expand your consciousness, you can catch ideas at a deeper level, and understand them more.

ST: Your work has always seemed to be open to consciousness, as far as I can tell. You seem to have more trust in your ideas, no matter what shape they may take, than other artists out there. Has meditation helped you build that trust?

Lynch: Absolutely, Scott. The ocean of pure consciousness is an ocean of all-knowingess. Think about it. It's the home of total knowledge, and it's right there. Modern science calls it the unified field. And now modern science like Vedic science says that every thing that is a thing emerges from this field, which is unmanifest, yet manifestation comes from it. So the unmanifest unified field of pure consciousness gives rise to every single thing that is a thing. Think about the intelligence that's there, and the creativity that's always been there, and you can dip into that. Now you start growing in intuition in an ocean of solutions, so you can see your way into making a thing feel correct. Like I keep saying, it's money in the bank!

ST: (Laughs) One of those solutions seems to be that you develop an appreciation for things outside of yourself, which this War-on-Terrorized world could use a bit more of these days.

Lynch: Yeah, you start loving things and people, and appreciating their differences. It doesn't happen overnight, but it happens, and some things happen right away. The anger that I had when I first started meditating in 1974 lifted in two weeks. It kinda just went away. It was weird. I didn't wish it away or imagine it away; it just went. And so I set up this foundation to raise money to give this to mainly students at first. We're trying to raise enough money to give transcendental meditation to any student that wants it, so they can dive within, start expanding that consciousness, start expanding that bliss, and get on the big, fast train to enjoying life.

ST: Well, it makes more sense to have kids meditate in class on the things in the world around them rather than have them pray to some monotheistic entity.

Lynch: Well, people from all religions meditate. It's not a religion; it's a technique to take you to that ocean which is unbounded, infinite and eternal. It'll take you right there! And it's the only experience -- where you transcend into pure consciousness -- that lights up the full brain on the EEG machine. It's called a holistic experience. All avenues of life start getting better. So instead of taking Ritalin, Prozac or any of those other drugs, you just sit and meditate for 20 minutes in the morning and afternoon, go about your business, and watch things get better and better. For the kids that have done it, it has changed their lives.

ST: Can this approach work in a digital environment like ours, where attention spans are getting shorter by the minute?

Lynch: There's an expression: Where the attention is, that becomes lively. When you start meditation, you can achieve a deeper focus, and generate a better understanding and appreciation through that focus. So you can say, "OK, it's a fast world, and this sounds too abstract" or whatever, but that's the way I felt two years before I started. If you think about it in another way, we're all human beings, and it has been said throughout time that the human being is very, very special. True happiness is not out there, true happiness lies within. Meditation, and especially transcendental meditation, will change your life. And you're built to have that experience; you're built to unfold it. And your full potential, Scott, is called enlightenment, and that is a real thing. We're all on that path together, but transcendental meditation accelerates it. Things get better. Real good.

ST: Well, we could use something that brings us together today, because the world is being torn apart by differences.

Lynch: They call it the unified field. At that level, we're all one. And enlivening the field of unity doesn't take away diversity; it makes you appreciate it more. The unified field is real. Better times are coming for this world.

ST: On that note, I want to talk about your coffee.

Lynch: I like the coffee that I drink right now.

ST: I thought you were considering a branded David Lynch.com coffee?

Lynch: We are, but I haven't found a coffee better than the one I'm drinking now.

ST: How many have you tested so far?

Lynch: Well, we haven't tested that many Scott, so we have more testing to do. And I think I have a testing next week. The idea is to really get ? well again, this is all subjective but I know what good coffee tastes like to me. And if I got that, we might do a David Lynch.com coffee.

ST: Oh man, that would be awesome.

Lynch: It would be awesome, Scott. We gotta have some coffee and some good times.

ST: Yes we do. Well, it was great to talk to you David, so thanks much for this interview.

Lynch: It was great to talk to you Scott. Keep up the good work, pal!

David Lynch Interview No. 2Sept. 26, 2006

Scott Thill: First, let's follow up on the non-Inland Empire projects you had in the hopper when we last talked in March.

David Lynch: Well, the ringtones are up. And I think ringtones had their moment about five months before ours went up! (Laughs) It took a long time. Every phone is different, so you've got to build them for like 15 different ones, so it was a big, big deal. But they're there, and there are a lot more on the way, but I'm not even sure how they're going. I've been working on my film, and just finished it. The coffee is also close to getting done, and that will be great. A new compilation DVD of content from DL.com is coming out soon as well, so those are the main things. And a lot of those pieces will look better on the DVD than they did on the site.

ST: So let's talk about Inland Empire. It's 172 minutes long, shot entirely in DV. And last time we talked, you said the quality of DV was terrible. So I'm thinking to myself, David Lynch thinks DV quality is terrible, but he nevertheless made a three-hour movie with it.

Lynch: Well, here's the thing. It's not terrible; it's just not the quality of film. I really love DV; I love what it can do for making films. I love it.

Then there's this machine called The Alchemist, which up-reses (increases the resolution of) the quality of your DV footage. See, in film, you sit with a timer, and time every scene and shot. And you can't stop the projector, or the film will burn up, so you're working on the fly. Then you make changes and go back and do the same thing the next day. And the bath can be a little different, because weird things happen. You look at it and time it some more, until you've finally zeroed in. It's a long, involved, tough procedure. Then you get it just right, and that's called an answer print. All of these things come off the negative. Then you make an IP, which is an interpositive print taken from the negative, which looks strange but nevertheless makes a beautiful negative. And that negative is the one you use to make your release prints. Through these processes, you often find that you get a lot more contrast, so you've got to check those prints. And for one reason or another, they might drift in color, light and dark, so you might have to put a few timing lights in the negative. So there's another thing.

ST: A serious process.

Lynch: Yeah, and now you get to the DVD. The timing you established for the film won't work for the DVD, so ?

ST: You have to start all over again.

Lynch: Start all over, Jack. In the telecine bay. Now, with the telecine bay, you've got control over blacks, midranges, whites, color and so on. You can stop and tweak stuff, get ideas and change things. It's beautiful, but it takes a long time, and normally you don't dick around with changing things. You just go make the color the way it was on film. But with DV, you put it through The Alchemist and you're there in the telecine bay -- first stop.

The Alchemist was a dream. Incredible! So now you've got close to a HD feel, and you drop that into the telecine bay. You've got so much control. You make a negative out of that, print it, and it's almost perfect. You can tweak it beautifully, and believe it or not, 98 percent of DV looks to me just as good as film. I love it. There are some artifacts in a few places, and those could be gotten rid of if you had the money to go in there and hand-correct it frame by frame.

ST: The way you did the Eraserhead DVD?

Lynch: No, cleaning is much easier now. It isn't a big problem anymore, but to go frame-by-frame on certain things is useful. If you've backlit someone, for example, you can sometimes get a shadow which is not a pretty thing. It turns into a black line, but it's OK. It's only in a couple places. But either way, DV looks so good. I really couldn't believe it.

ST: I'll take 98 percent.

Lynch: Yeah, but now that's yesterday's story. There are cameras coming out now that are going to make shooting digitally a serious dream.

ST: When you think about how you started out as a filmmaker and then about how today's artists are getting a head start with all this convenient tech, what jumps out at you?

Lynch: It's a dream world now. But like I always say, everybody has access to a piece of paper and a pencil. But how many great stories are written? Now everybody has access to at least a pretty inexpensive camera, and if you get the ideas and think on your feet, you can make a feature film. You can get a little Pro Tools rig, a DV camera, an editing system and some drives set up, and you can make a feature film. It's so great. So great.

ST: In your eyes, how has this exponential innovation changed the power structure of the industry?

Lynch: We're watching it go away, every day. Look at what's going on in the music industry and you will see what is coming for the film industry. Everyone and their little brother these days has a digital still camera. Some people pay for their music on iTunes -- although a lot get their music for free -- and now TV shows and movies are on iTunes as well. So there are going to be some serious readjustments!

ST: Do you think they're ready for them?

Lynch: Nobody's ready for them.

ST: Where do you see yourself in that relationship? In one sense, you're an insider. But on the other hand, you've struck out on your own, with the site, with DV, with film narratives that resemble Gordian knots.

Lynch: You just do what you do. I live in Hollywood, but I don't hang out with industry people. And I haven't made a studio film. I've never made a studio film. Dune was between Dino de Laurentis and Universal, and The Elephant Man was sort of between Paramount, EMI and Mel Brooks, although Brooks' company was the one who did it. And Dino really did produce Dune.

ST: And Blue Velvet as well?

Lynch: Blue Velvet was distributed through Dino's company, so I've never really made a studio film. And now I work with the French, Canal Plus, and they've been so good to me. Before that, I worked with CiBy 2000, but when the owner died I lost that gig.

ST: Do you think that, when the industry wakes to these changes, they'll feel they have been having a dream or a nightmare?

Lynch: Well, it was a pretty good dream, and now it will be a pretty good nightmare. You can feel it. It's real different.

ST: How about your latest works, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, both of which are films sort of about the practice of filmmaking, its industry, its actors, its vicissitudes, its virtues and so on. There are so many metafictional layers there, so I'm curious how the strands come together for you.

Lynch: Ideas. You get ideas. Ideas tell you everything. There's a cart and then there is a horse. And the horse is supposed to be in front of the cart, pulling it along.

ST: So you're the horse?

Lynch: No, the ideas are the horse. So you don't start by saying, "I'm going to make my film a commentary on Hollywood." Some people do work that way, and that's fine. But I'm going along and get an idea I happen to fall in love with. So the ones I fall in love with, you discover ways in which cinema can make them happen. It fires me up, and I start going. It's a trip, and I don't know a lot of the time where it's headed, but it's beautiful nonetheless. And the idea dictates everything.

ST: Recalling our conversation on TM earlier, you explained one of its tenets as being "Where the attention is, that becomes lively." Do you feel that, in a way, because you're in geographical proximity to Hollywood and part of its industry to a certain extent, that your attention is firmly on it, and that your films are enlivened exercises of that attention?

Lynch: Not really. I always say that it's desire that drives the stream of ideas coming in. You desire something and it starts pulling the ideas. We are truly influenced by our environment and our world, but now the input is not just coming from the surrounding block or city, but from all over the world.

ST: Like the internet?

Lynch: Yeah, that's the "all over the place" part. The whole world is now flowing in, if you want it to. So there's a ton of information flying in. I will also say that you can get an idea and then check it against this cloud made up of everything, and see if it's an idea that seems to go with the now. Sometimes I do that, but I don't know. It's catching ideas. That's the thing. You can catch the same ideas anywhere.

ST: Do you think the industry takes it personally?

Lynch: Well, I don't know. Critics are human beings, and they have the opportunity to write their opinions. And I never really say what my films are about for me, because the films should stand on their own. It's common sense. So people are allowed to invent their own conclusions. Critics see tons of films, and there are all different kind of critics.

ST: But not just critics, also filmmakers and the like. Some of them might look at Inland Empire and say, "Lynch is making another film trashing the industry."

Lynch: I don't know what to say, because they say what they say.

ST: I read a quote of yours in a review of Inland Empire that spoke volumes, something to the extent that you never understood why people expect their art to make sense when they accept that life often does not.

Lynch: But it does make sense. It can make beautiful sense, but what I meant was that if everything is just on the surface, then you're going to get just that. And if you use your intuition and think your way into different places, then you can get more out of it. I always say film has an ability to communicate abstractions, things you can't say in other ways. So you experience art and film, and in that way it is like life. We're experiencing it. People can look around and some will find clues in everyday life and others will see what they want to see. It's fine. But a lot of people get frustrated when they encounter an abstraction. I don't. I love abstraction.

ST: I do as well, if only because they shift the burden of interpretation onto the viewer.

Lynch: Well, if you take a painter like Franz Klein and have him put one of his abstract expressionist works from the '50s into words, it's a joke. So that's the painting. Film has got the same beautiful things. And it's not abstraction for abstraction's sake: It's a way, it's a language, and it's based on ideas. And you see what it can do to those things. It's so beautiful. So beautiful.

ST: How did the process of filmmaking change for you working with DV, compared to the old tech of Dune and the rest? How did the actors react to the technology? Talk about that a bit.

Lynch: Well, it's a bunch of different things. But DV is a miracle, a beautiful miracle.

ST: Do actors feel uncomfortable working with something like the 40-minute takes that DV provides?

Lynch: No, they don't feel uncomfortable at all. They feel way, way good. How about this? You're in the middle of a scene and you run out of film. But people get used to it. You stop and reload. Some guys can reload super fast. That changes with DV. Or the actors: I've been talking to them while shooting for some time now. But with DV, we can talk and talk and film and film and get in there and perhaps hit something, some button that we wouldn't have been able to capture if we had to keep stopping to reload the camera. It's magical.

Say I want to turn around and shoot the reverse: I can that turn around in a millisecond. With a 35-mm camera, the turnaround isn't a millisecond, it's a long time. Some people say that you need to make sure that the lighting is correct and all of that, but you see what you've got. If you need to tweak something, you tweak something. But if you're happy with the setup, you can get into a scene without interrupting it, really get into it, popping back and forth, back and forth, talking the entire time. It's a beautiful thing for an actor. Beautiful, for me and the actors. It's so good.

ST: It would seem like they don't have to turn it off and turn it on again, depending on the whims of the camera.

Lynch: Well, when you turn it off, it's not always so easy to turn it back on again. Sometimes, you catch a thing that is so delicate, and if you turn it off then on again, it's not there anymore. That's the thing right there. It's real delicate.

ST: From what I've read from the Inland Empire actors so far, including Laura Dern, Justin Theroux and others, working with you on a film is serious fun.

Lynch: It should be fun. Life should be fun. There are all these stories about people wanting to visit film sets, and after being there for half a day, they all want to leave. It's so boring, because there is so much downtime. As for the actors, after going to their trailers, something happens. They go to their trailers quick, but come back slowly. You know, you want to get everything they can give on tape, and with DV you have way more chances to do that.

ST: It's so interesting to hear them say that it's fun, though. Theroux called it a "goof."

Lynch: Well, it's not a goof. He may have said that, but he meant it was fun. It's supposed to be fun, meaning it's not supposed to be something you hate doing, or have an uncomfortable time doing. What good is that? It's like common sense. Anything different than "fun" is peculiar and absurd. Why shouldn't it be fun? It should be fun, and it can be fun. And that's when you get good stuff, good work. You discover things together. It's beautiful.

ST: And it's wonderful to hear the actors you've worked with talk about how much fun they had making films that scare the hell out of people watching them!

Lynch: Again, it's based on the ideas. A one-genre film is limiting -- but in a way every film is limiting. Soon as you get an idea, it indicates a path. And when you start going down one path, it means you're not able to go down all the others. You've been directed down only one, so it's limiting. But going down there, it can be a wide beautiful path. And there's room for all kinds of things. But it's the ideas.

ST: You said you started meditation in 1973, and have used it to approach these ideas. Has that processed changed for you over the last few decades?

Lynch: The way I catch ideas?

ST: Yeah, the way they come to you, they way you follow them into your films, and so on.

Lynch: OK, I've been working on this book called Catching the Big Fish, and it's all in there. It's changed for me. It's gotten better. If it just stayed the same or got worse, I'd stop meditating. People get up and brush their teeth. They brush their teeth so they don't get cavities, right?

ST: God, I hope.

Lynch: But if they brushed their teeth and were able to dive within to contact that pure ocean of bliss and consciousness, they'd get a huge blast of euphoric energy and be wider awake. And that ball of consciousness would expand over time, so they would really look forward to brushing their teeth every day.

It always strikes me as amazing that everyone doesn't meditate. Because they haven't had that transcendent experience, they don't think they're missing anything. I was in the same boat. I never had that, or I didn't know I ever had it, and I was curious. I wanted it. And that's the key thing: You've got to want it, even if you don't know why. Something is there that you feel but do not know.

But I've always felt that there were other things to life that were not so obvious. Everyone sort of feels that there is more in the world than meets the eye, and its pull grows stronger and stronger, until they say, "I want to know what the full potential of a human being is. I want to unfold that for myself. I don't want to stay exactly the same as I am. I want to rapidly move forward."

David Lynch Interview No. 3Dec. 6 2006

Scott Thill: The distribution deal is interesting news. Can you tell me why you decided to take over that aspect of the film?

David Lynch: Scott, you know more than I that the world is changing. And Inland Empire was done in such an unorthodox way, from the equipment used to not really knowing what I was doing at the beginning. It was kind of an experiment, a grand experiment, the whole thing. And it makes sense to me to continue that same way of thinking with distribution. It is sort of frightening but, at the same time, I think it is the future. The reason is I can work with these great people that think in a new way, and are open to trying new things. I can take more control myself, and then go out amongst the people, meet the theater owners and others, and see what that aspect of distribution is actually like. It's pretty exciting.

ST: I think it's a great idea. I mentioned it during our first talk, and you kind of brushed it off, but I wasn't sure if that was because you were already thinking of doing it!

Lynch: (Laughs) Well, it's a big risk. I put a lot of money into this film already, and I don't have a lot of money. But this way, honestly, I've never seen a nickel from every distribution deal I've ever done in this country. That's the long and the short of it. And that sucks!

ST: Will the website come into play, whether streaming the film, making it available for download, and so on?

Lynch This I don't know. That's the future for sure, but whether or not that time is here, at this minute, I don't know. I can just say that we are going out theatrically and with DVDs, and downloads are probably right behind that.

ST: I think it'll work well for you.

Lynch: I hope so, Scott.

ST: Speaking of getting out to the people, I saw video of you in Hollywood stumping for Laura Dern with a poster and a live cow.

Lynch: That's exactly right. You know, there are a bunch of Academy members and all sorts of other awards activity going on out there. And people solve problems with money normally; well, I don't have any money. And I also feel that the Academy members must be sick of seeing ad after ad after ad costing a fortune with no one really paying attention. Honestly, I'm out there with the cow, and meeting the greatest bunch of people. The other day, we had my friend (director of USC's Polish Music Center) Marek Zebrowski out there playing piano. It was so beautiful, such a great day, out with Georgia the cow, beautiful piano music, meeting so many great people.

ST: Yeah, from all the clips I saw, everyone looked pretty happy to see you.

Lynch: I was happy to be there!

ST: Some of the Rabbits footage shows up in the Inland Empire, and I was just wondering whether those scenes were extensions of the DL.com series, or new material?

Lynch: Everything was re-shot for better quality, but the Rabbits series started something going in my head for Inland Empire.

ST: Do you feel the site is a good place to test those ideas out and get feedback before moving them into a feature film or larger project?

Lynch: Scott, experiments lead sometimes to wondrous things. And the whole reason for the site was to put experiments up, and by doing these experiments, like I've said before, one thing leads to another. That is how I discovered the Sony PD150 was so beautiful. That's how I discovered that digital editing was so beautiful. That is how I discovered everything. It all comes from the experiments done for the site.

ST: Do you feel that process, once it's picked up by other artists and directors, will change the way films are made? Do you think that they might use their sites to create formative experiments online that will balloon into feature exercises?

Lynch: Every single step ... it's like they say, the Academy of Arts and Sciences, you know? Scientists are so beautiful. They come up with these things, and then the other side of the coin is that artists grab hold of them, and who knows what can happen? The world is always changing, that's rule number one. And many times, the form or the medium will start to speak, and it dictates what comes out of that communication. It's a beautiful thing.

ST: It will be interesting to see how the medium of the web will change the way films are made, viewed and distributed.

Lynch: They felt that way about TV, the way it influenced things. The internet will influence things. Events in the world will influence things. We're all kind of finding our way.

ST: The new film is about three hours long. Did you leave anything on the floor?

Lynch: Well, I always say the same thing: A film isn't finished until it's finished, and when it is finished that means it feels correct to the filmmaker. And some films are so many minutes, and others are so many minutes, and that's just the way it is.

ST: Do you think the site would be a cool place to show off what didn't make it into the film?

DL: Some could be on the website, and some could be on the DVD as stand-alone scenes. Who knows? But when you're making a film ? if you talk to 100 different filmmakers, they'll tell you that some things end up on the cutting-room floor. It's a process.

ST: A curse figures into Inland Empire. Do you feel cursed, or is there continuity with other similarly cursed characters from your past films?

Lynch: No, no. The thing is that when an idea comes, sometimes you fall in love with it, and that's they key to starting a project. You get an idea that you fall in love with. And I started getting these ideas, and I wasn't sure how they related. I was shooting them, not just writing them down. Well, I was writing them down and then directly shooting them, so I didn't know where they were going. But the film is based on those ideas, not on anybody from my past. It just comes out. Now, is it somehow related to things in the world? You know, I hope so.

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“Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.” - Andy Warhol

The Big Self in the Unified Field: Up From the Deepest Level with David Lynchby Cameron Bird; Filter Magazine

Hollywood’s underbelly hasn’t shrunk an inch since film noirists swept through on a gust of gallows and reimagined the town as a drowning dreamscape. Today, the tabloids intrusively tap into celebrity networks and the trade rags quantify studio earnings as if “the business” was Wall Street’s sister system. The sinister reality is no secret to the average media consumer: precocious kids shoved into the limelight by their parents and shoved out by substance-addled pubescence, adult actors stratified into A-B-C-lists, and blockbusters rolled out with businessmen as the quality controllers.

Marilyn Monroe, with her skirt blowing just high enough to distract onlookers from her philosophic panic, put it succinctly: “Hollywood’s a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss, and fifty cents for your soul.”

It’s only fitting that 61-year-old David Lynch carves out his existence at the highest peak of this alternate world, in the Hollywood Hills, where his panoramic view seeps like luminescent effluence into his creative fountainhead. Wilder than Billy Wilder, Lynch—the filmmaker, painter and carpenter; an auteur if the word weren’t so wobbly—has transmitted some of the most haunting images in the history of western civilization, or at least since the Lumière brothers stupefied Parisian audiences with the world’s first motion pictures.

In their inaugural 46-second film from 1895, the Lumières framed a crowd of female workers filing away from a factory. Curiously, on the hundredth anniversary of the brothers’ innovation, Lynch got a hold of their original cinématographe camera and crafted “Premonitions Following An Evil Deed,” a nebulous montage of scenes including a wide shot of masked men marching through a factory while nude ladies tread water in cage-like cylindrical chambers. It’s a twisted nod to his filmic forefathers, and like a lot of Lynchian creations, it crawls under the skin and proceeds to pry open the floorboards of the psyche.

Wriggling free from dark, cryptic forces is a common narrative thread throughout Lynch’s oeuvre. Though we, as an audience, are never let in on the identity of the causal agent behind the curtain, we always witness the nightmarish fallout. In Eraserhead, a pig-nosed infant pushes a father to the edge of his good intentions. In The Elephant Man, an exploitative freak show curator and a horde of unruly British chavs chase down a malformed prodigy until he reaches the brink of existential exhaustion.

And in the recent Inland Empire, advertised vaguely as a story about “a woman in trouble,” a silver-screen starlet played by Lynch regular Laura Dern stumbles from a soundstage into a claustrophobic labyrinth where her identity is feverishly vacuumed away. Like Lynch’s previous puzzler, Mulholland Dr., the abstraction of a plotline can be read as a number of things: a rail against the movie industry, a treatise on the objectification of women, or an antidote to the closing of the American mind.

Interpretations of this nature, however, are a prodigious stretch. Extracting authorial intent has proven a fruitless exercise for even the most insatiable interviewers, and there’s no indication that Lynch is softening to that line of questioning in his prime.

Yet, in conversation, the graying figure with arsenic streaks in his pompadour borders on Pollyannaish. Belying the surreal dance of his art, he speaks in a “gee-golly” Montanan drawl and attributes his optimism to the practice of Transcendental Meditation. In 2005, more than 30 years after he initiated the TM regimen per suggestion of his sister, he cut the ribbon on the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace. And this year, he published a little blue book called Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity, in which he advances the theory that “anything that is a thing comes up from the deepest level.” If he has his way, all the children of the world—red, yellow, black, white—will begin to fold their legs into the lotus position, silence their egos and attain sheer, unadulterated enlightenment.

It’s a surprising philanthropic move for a triple-divorcée who fastidiously consumes the blackest of coffee to wash down chain cigarette smoke, and it’s even more left-field for an artist whose livelihood dwells on the darkest of matters. Still, maybe, just maybe, Lynch’s rosiness will cure the world from the nightmarish net he has cast over it. Perhaps he’ll even send enough good vibes down the hillside to reclaim Hollywood.

At one point in the creative process do you decide which medium you’re going to use?You always know it. You see it and feel it and therefore kind of hear it. If it’s a chair idea, you’ll see a chair and make it. If it’s a cinema idea, you’ll see characters and the way they dress and how they talk and what they say and the room they’re in and the lighting—the feel of it. And it’s clearly a cinema idea. It’s the same way with music. You get an idea—sometimes it’s small at first—but it’s just enough to get you to sit down in front of the canvas or sit down and write or sit down and do something, or stand up and do something. You open up a door and more of it just floods in.

Do ideas come to you on a daily basis?Well, sometimes you don’t fall in love with them, and so it seems like a drought. You see ideas, many even, but they’re not ones that thrill your soul. Then, like a picture show, it may quickly change, and then it’ll start to look like something you could fall in love with. The key is that the idea has got to make you fall in love with it; it has to thrill you. Those are real blessings, but they don’t come all the time.

You’ve had your own share of stalled and cancelled projects; your planned short films Ronnie Rocket and Gardenback come to mind. What kind of toll does it take on you when an idea doesn’t come to fruition?Well, you can really only look at it as if it’s just not meant to be. The timing is wrong or something’s wrong with it. Perhaps it’s not quite fully formed. It just doesn’t get the green light. When you don’t get green lights, it makes you wonder, which leads to the thing that can make it correct. When you really feel it’s correct, you suddenly believe in it more and love it more. And those two things—believing in it and loving it—will turn red lights to green a lot of the time. Then you’re rolling.

Is make-believe an accurate description of what you do when creating a work of fiction?I think I know what the term “make-believe” means, sort of. [Laughs] But you could say, rather, there are a whole bunch of different so-called realities. When you get an idea, it seems really real. And you know it because you see it and feel it. When you translate it to cinema, you have to create a world that didn’t exist. It’s an experience you can’t have in any other way. This is a magical thing! You go into the world and you begin to know the people, the characters. It’s real when you’re in there. It’s just as real as anything.

In the past, you’ve not included chapters on the DVDs of your films. Why did you decide to add them on Inland Empire?To cut down on the frustration level of the viewers. The reason I didn’t like them initially was because the film, to me, is the number one thing on the DVD, and it should be held in a very special place. Chapter stops, to me, meant that someone could see it or perceive it in fragments. It putrefied the thing, hurt it, in my mind. I think most people see the whole film, but if for some reason they have to take a leak and forget to pause it, they can find their way back. If you can’t find your way back to that point, it’s frustrating. Obviously, the best possible world would be to see the thing start to finish on a big screen, with very high-quality sound, in a dark room, and be able to really and truly go into the world. That’s the way it should be.

I guess it’s a lot to ask in a world where an ever-increasing number of people watch cable news on their cell phones and movies on their iPods.Right. It’s a sadness, I say. People think they have experienced the film, but unfortunately they haven’t experienced it fully if they’ve only seen it on an iPod or at home on a small screen.

But how do you harmonize this reality with your Web savvy?Once the Internet becomes a more dominant source of media, it’ll be a different experience. I always say that the medium talks to us. Well, it doesn’t say so much as it causes change in your ideas so that they can fulfill the medium’s promise. The Internet has its own feel and a giant screen in the theater with big sound has its own feel. And since more and more people are no longer going to the theater, and more and more are going to the Internet or watching things on an iPod, it’s going to suddenly start changing the content and the ideas. At the same time, people are getting home systems that are pretty killer, either a great big flat screen or a projection TV and good speakers. They’re having an experience. They can tell you that it’s way more powerful to see it this way. It might be nice in an airport to see something on a small screen, but I’d save the good ones for the home big screen or try and see it in the theater.

Simultaneously, the entry threshold for generating media—songs, films, whatever—has also been lowered. What effect does this have on the media industries?In the beginning, when the Lumière brothers invented the motion picture camera and took it out, people would marvel at the moving pictures. One thing led to another, people started making stories and added sound and got more and more sophisticated and the film stocks got better and better. The cameras got better and better. The sound got better and better. And it bloomed into a huge business that many people were barred from. People can now get ideas, use their common sense, go out with a small digital camera and make a feature film. And the cost isn’t going to kill them. They can get familiar with that medium and the ideas are married to that. They can do it without a studio; without all these heavy expensive film cameras. And it’s just a beautiful world now...beautiful!

Your films of late have been set against the backdrop of a dark, ominous movie industry. In Inland Empire, Grace Zabriskie’s character says, “a little girl went into the world, got lost in the marketplace.” Does entering the marketplace—be it Hollywood, the local shopping mall, or just consumerism in the general sense—cause us to lose ourselves?For sure, but it’s much more than any kind of mall. It’s the field of relativity. The marketplace is huge, but what’s even bigger than the marketplace is the unified field, the field of oneness that underlies the marketplace. That’s the field that holds the stuff we human beings really treasure. The marketplace is a place that’s filled with fascination, but you lose yourself there.

A lot of your characters seem to lose themselves and their senses of identity. Do you see this as a common element in all your works?Well, I’d have to think about that, but it is a common theme in life. That’s for sure, so it has to be included in films. It’s a theme of pretty much every film, in a way…[Pauses and begins a new thought in mid-sentence] Lost in darkness and confusion…that’s something I used to think about a lot.

You have three children. How young were they when they saw their first Lynch film, or rather, when they were allowed to see their first Lynch film?I guess my daughter Jennifer was eight when she saw Eraserhead. A lot of times the mothers would try to keep them from seeing my films. I sat down with my son Riley this last year and he watched all of them, one every week. That was a good experience for us.

You’ve proposed that every child in the world ought to have a class period set aside each day to meditate. Your foundation is trying to raise $7 billion for that very goal. How close are you?Well, we’ve raised a lot of money, but we’re a long way from $7 billion. But I heard the other day some company is buying another company for $180 billion. $7 billion is a very small amount of money relative to that. That $7 billion would permanently establish peace-breeding groups and change the entire world to one of peace. End of suffering. End of negativity. All good things for all of us! It’d turn us into a true world family where diversity would be fully appreciated in the light of its preexisting unity. And it would be incredible! Think of the ideas that would flow out of that kind of scenario and how rapidly we would lurch forward into huuuge evolution. Good for everybody. It would be incredible. It’s magical. It’s profound. It’s huuuge. And it’s already in the works, but I would like to raise that money. And it just takes wealthy well-wishers of humanity to suddenly see that this could be a reality, a real thing, and bag it. It just takes that.

In Transcendental Meditation, what is the means by which someone gains access to what you’ve called in the past the “infinite ocean of consciousness”? Is it the meditator’s willpower?It’s the technique. It’s like there’s a treasury and a door and the door is locked. You can know about the treasury. You can hear all kinds of things about it, but you can’t experience it unless someone gives you the key to that door. When you get the key, the door easily opens and you experience the treasury within. TM is a mental technique, an ancient form of meditation that Maharishi brought back. It’s easy and effortless and so profound. It’s easy because the mantra you’re given turns the mind within and once the mind is pointed within, it naturally dives through subtler levels of mind and intellect. And naturally, at the border of intellect and that big ocean, it transcends.

But this just happens when someone positions and quiets themselves to meditate? How is that?Why is it natural? Because every deeper level of mind and intellect has more happiness than the one before. So the mind, once pointed within, wants to dive in because it sees more happiness. And when it transcends and experiences the big ocean of pure vibrant consciousness, man oh man! What an experience. And the experience enlivens the ocean, enlivens consciousness, and you grow in intelligence, creativity, love, bliss, and inner-happiness like you can’t believe. You grow in energy—you don’t get sleepy and stupid, you get packed with inspiration. There’s the expression, “know thy self,” and this is that, but the big Self, the Self of us all. When you unfold that, you unfold your full potential, which is enlightenment, fulfillment, liberation, total freedom, end of suffering, immortality.

Is it true that if several groups of 8,000 simultaneously meditate, it’ll bring about permanent world peace?They say it equals the square of the number of participants. So, huuuuge waves of harmony and coherence move isotropically at the speed of light. And the world lifts up into happiness and harmony, negativity goes away, and you got a whole new ballgame.

There is a new book out that is described as "David Lynch in his own words." It sounds like a fun read as I remember a few years back on a Lost Highway website there were several great quotes from Lynch on the set of the film.

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“Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.” - Andy Warhol

Filmmaker David Lynch is a renowned experimenter, not just in the medium of film, but also with paint, comics and even furniture. Musically, he's delved deep into meditative sounds and abstract sonic experimentation, leading to albums with composers like his longtime collaborator, Angelo Badalamenti.

But throughout the years, one experiment Lynch never tried was plunking down in front of the microphone himself. ''I always was super embarrassed to sing,'' he says. But that changed on ''Ghost of Love,'' a hauntingly poignant track that first appeared on the ''Inland Empire'' soundtrack and is now available as a single -- and a precursor to a full blues-inspired album, with Lynch sitting in the troubadour seat the whole time.

The famed director and new singer sat down with Metromix at his studio in the Hollywood Hills to discuss his upcoming album, his high school marching band and the reasons why Radiohead may inadvertently increase homelessness in L.A.

A: No. It was the first song where I sang high. Not high on drugs. [laughs]. With a high voice.

Q: The cover for the single is pretty rock 'n' roll -- you've got the cigarette and the sunglasses. There's a clip on YouTube of you singing with a big cowboy hat. I'm wondering whether there's a persona at work.

A: There has to be a persona, otherwise I couldn't do it. It seems like the cowboy hat and the sunglasses help a lot.

Q: You've talked in the past about how an audience's experience of a film can be hurt by knowing too much personal stuff about the filmmakers. Do you feel the same holds true for music?

A: I think the whole thing is the purity of the experience. You don't want to do anything to hurt people's experience of going into another world. And so that should be protected.

Q: What stage is the album in?

A: There are songs written. I'd say there are three songs ready to go, and about four or five in the works. We're finding a groove, and it's going along, yeah.

Q: The expectation after an album release would be live shows.

A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've talked about that. I can play things once. The problem is playing them twice. [laughs] We'd have to get a band together and work stuff out. It's conceivable, but there's a lot of work to be done before the road show.

Q: Some songwriters say that songs can arrive at any time, and others will say that they really have to be in the right mindset. What's the process like for you?

A: Well, how it's working now is that there are chords that are picked. Dean [Hurley, Lynch's engineer] will program these chords into my guitar, and then we get a drumbeat going. The tempo and the type of the beat, the sound of the guitar and those chord progressions -- that conjures a mood and makes you play a certain way. Dean will put on a bass track and we'll throw out stuff and rearrange some stuff. And then, listening to it, lyrics will come.

Q: And when you finish, is there a ''Boom! Voila!'' moment?

A: Yeah, same with everything. Painting, films, music -- there's a moment when you say, ''It's done, it feels right.'' There are some times when you go and listen to something really objectively later and you say, ''Oh, you know, I could maybe tweak that a little bit.'' But mostly it feels correct.

Q: How far back can you trace the roots of your love for music? Was there a parental inspiration?

A: Well, it was a little bit [due to] my parents, who loved music. My dad played the violin, and he played the tuba and piano. He liked to sing. I played trumpet and I loved playing trumpet -- until I went to high school, where they forced all the orchestra people to join the marching band, which is when I quit. There went the trumpet. But I really think I have a love of sound, and experimenting with sound. It seems to go hand in hand with picture in the world of cinema.

Q: There's a debate now -- heightened by the Radiohead release last year -- about whether people should become accustomed to getting their music or their art for free.

A: I just saw this thing on TV where in some country -- I think it's an African country -- they have taken to this idea that CDs are advertisements for people to come to their shows. They have these big shows where bands play to huge crowds. The CD is just an advertisement -- and that's the way it's going more and more here. They're way ahead of us. They never shot film because they couldn't afford film, so they've been into digital video forever, and they're making hundreds of films. Just like now a theatrical release is sort of an advertisement for the DVD. It's just going that way.

The problem with piracy and getting stuff for free is that pretty soon you can't afford to make anything or live anywhere. So there will just be that many more homeless people. Even in L.A., it gets chilly or rainy, like it is today. So you imagine, you're with your cardboard box in the rain and you're hungry, and you're just not going to be making those albums anymore, you know what I mean? You're going to try to get your next meal. And your tastes will probably change. Cheap wine will start to be just as good. [laughs] You're just looking for some cheap wine and a sandwich.

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“Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.” - Andy Warhol

Questions for David LynchThe VisionaryInterview by DEBORAH SOLOMON; New York Times

This interview is scheduled to appear in a special issue on screens, so let’s start by contemplating the current fascination with the small screen.

That’s a terrible subject. There’s nothing like the big screen. The cinema is really built for the big screen and big sound, so that a person can go into another world and have an experience. As an example, there’s Stanley Kubrick’s “2001:A Space Odyssey” — this would be kind of a pathetic joke on a little screen.

How do you feel about someone watching your films — “Eraserhead,” “Blue Velvet,” “Mulholland Drive” — on a laptop?More and more people are seeing the films on computers — lousy sound, lousy picture — and they think they’ve seen the film, but they really haven’t.

Because the small screen emphasizes plot over visuals?It’s a pathetic horror story.

On the other hand, you do appear on countless computer screens every day, giving a weather report from your home in Los Angeles, on your Web site.People are kind of interested in weather. It’s not artistic. It’s just me sitting there in my painting studio.

Who films you?It’s a camera that comes down out of the ceiling.

I hear you’re starting an online series on transcendental meditation, based on your book “Catching the Big Fish.” Is the small screen a good format for discussing meditation?Any format is a good format for meditation. Every single person has within an ocean of pure vibrant consciousness. Every single human being can experience that — infinite intelligence, infinite creativity, infinite happiness, infinite energy, infinite dynamic peace.

Tell us about your foundation.The David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace — we raise money to give meditation to any student or school. There is a huge waiting list.

As a devotee of cultivated bliss, how do you explain the proclivity for twisted eroticism and dismembered body parts in your films? A filmmaker doesn’t have to suffer to show suffering. You just have to understand it. You don’t have to die to shoot a death scene.

Do you see yourself as an American Surrealist?Dennis Hopper called me that, and that is the way he sees it. It’s more than just Surrealism to me.

I think of you as someone who transported the noir sensibility from the city into a Norman Rockwell setting. What do you think of his paintings? I love his work. It’s like Edward Hopper. They see a certain thing, and they catch it.

What is that clock you’re holding in this photograph?I just didn’t want to stand there like an idiot. It’s an old clock, but I am building this plastic bubble around it.

Is it a sculpture?In a way it is. You mentioned Surrealism, and time was very important to the Surrealists.

But Dali painted melting clocks, and yours isn’t melting, is it?It’s not melting, no. But part of it is made of polyester resin, which at one time was liquid.

you know, i never really cared much about david lynch's personal life, but this interview shed light on inland empire and now i think i finally understand that movie. he divorced his wife who was also his editor. that explains why it was so FUCKING LONG!

also, i thought that picture of him was a picture of a david lynch action figure, and now i want one.

Logged

The corpses all hang headless and limp bodies with no surprises and the blood drains down like devil’s rain we’ll bathe tonight I want your skulls I need your skulls I want your skulls I need your skulls Demon I am and face I peel to see your skin turned inside out, ’cause gotta have you on my wall gotta have you on my wall, ’cause I want your skulls I need your skulls I want your skulls I need your skulls collect the heads of little girls and put ’em on my wall hack the heads off little girls and put ’em on my wall I want your skulls I need your skulls I want your skulls I need your skulls

The interview: David LynchWith his enigmatic masterpieces Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive, the director created a dark, disturbing vision of America. Now, he says, he is done with ﬁlms in favour of making art from paint, cameras and 'toxic materials' – and practising transcendental meditation. He talks to Gaby Wood.Gaby Wood and Hazel Sheffield; The Observer

Up a steep, strange, snake of a street and sheer, straight steps is a set of concrete buildings clinging onto the side of the Hollywood Hills. In an attempt to penetrate the bunker (I have an appointment, after all) I mistakenly walk into an empty recording studio, where a state-of-the-art mixing table spans several metres and a blank cinema screen covers a wall in front of it. Beyond this, the place is all skylights and high slit windows – a bright but viewless series of rooms with severe angles and unpredictable shifts, blind corners around which are an empty kitchen or an empty meeting room with a single lightbulb drawn in chalk on a blackboard. Once inside, its geography is impossible to decipher.

I have come to meet David Lynch, who lives, works and meditates here – the bunker includes offices, an outdoor painting studio and a home. Lynch has just brought out a lavish retrospective set of DVDs, which includes (among other things) material from his student days that he found in a foot locker, a brand new sound mix of Blue Velvet, Eraserhead, The Elephant Man and deleted scenes from Wild at Heart – all of which makes one wonder where he's been in more recent years. Mulholland Drive – an unparalleled triumph in my view – was released in 2001; since then he's made some entertainingly loopy shorts and Inland Empire, a three-hour ode to impenetrability that was shot on digital video and struggled to find a distributor . "I'm through with film as a medium," he wrote in a book published two years ago. "For me, film is dead." What ever happened to David Lynch?

He enters, a dishevelled version of himself: the rockabilly hair caving at an angle, the buttoned-up white shirt not as neat as it might be, silvery stubble on his chin. He offers me a coffee – his own brand, of which he drinks at least 15 cups a day – and settles into a battered armchair with a packet of American Spirit cigarettes. The concrete floors turn out to have a practical purpose: you can routinely drop cigarette ash on them without worrying about starting a fire (the chair in Lynch's studio is forever at risk of being buried in butts).

"I just love this camera," Lynch says, in his nasal, deliberate, almost robotically enthusiastic voice. We are looking at a large chiaroscuro nude, which has been printed in two parts and hung on the wall, and Lynch is telling me about his Hasselblad digital. Unbelievable. Thirty-nine million pixels. The camera remembers something like 4,000 pieces of information per photograph. It is machine. It's a machine." A look of delight passes across his face. "It's just a glorious world," he says.

Lynch has been taking a great deal of photographs some of which will be shown as part of the Format09 photography festival in Derby this month – and they have long been a component in his mixed-media canvases. He says he mainly likes to photograph nudes and factories, a curious combination until you see that the factories are defunct, celebrated for their decay and decomposition in a way that renders them organic – like the nudes, they seem stripped bare and almost mortal.

In 2007, the Fondation Cartier in Paris put together a big show of Lynch's artwork spanning more than 40 years. There were Keith Haring-like doodles and sketches on napkins; there were his taxonomic boards: a disassembled fish or pinneddown bees with names like Chuck, Bing, Ralph and Hank; there were large paintings that incorporated clothes, watches and words scrawled in oil paint. Lynch says he is now working on a new series of paintings – though the weather in Los Angeles this week has stalled him somewhat: it's unusually cold and gloomy, and Lynch works outdoors because he tends to use "toxic materials". These particular works include tile glue and cotton balls and, "you know, lightbulbs".

The muscular nature of Lynch's work is not something often associated with him. He's thought to be a reticent cinematic visionary, yet most of his time, when he's not working on a film (and just now he is not), is spent creating these sprawling two-dimensional works involving electric saws, brown sludge and molten plastic. A recent documentary (Lynch (One)) shows him doing this himself, always in his uniform of baggy beige chinos and buttoned-up shirt – the buttons are done even when the shirt is spattered with paint or half hanging out of his trousers. He is more Jackson Pollock than François Truffaut.

"I love paint," he says, in the same mechanical tone he used to describe his camera. "I like watercolours. I like acrylic paint … a little bit. I like house paint. I like oil-based paint, and I love oil paint. I love the smell of turpentine and I like that world of oil paint very, very, very much."

There are two traditional views of Lynch in person: either that he is as weird as his films suggest, or that he's unnervingly, wholesomely ordinary. The fact is, he doesn't like talking about his work. As Chris Rodley writes in his book of interviews, Lynch on Lynch: "Nowadays, a director's commentary on a movie's DVD release is standard issue. For Lynch, this is the very definition of a nightmare situation."

For instance, here is Lynch, when I meet him, on how his films come together. He speaks slowly, as if teaching me the basics of his mysterious art: "Sometimes I get an idea for cinema. And when you get an idea that you fall in love with, this is a glorious day. That idea may just be 1a fragment, but it holds something. It might be a scene, or a part of a scene, or a character, or a way the character talks, a light or a feel ... You write that idea down. And thinking about that idea will bring other ideas in – there's a hook to it. And things start to emerge. And then you see, one day, a script. A script is just words to remind you of the ideas. And you follow that, but always staying on guard, in case other ideas come in, because a thing isn't finished till it's finished. And one day, it's finished."

"Christ!" I thought when I heard this, "What am I supposed to do with that?" In the course of our interview Lynch had made (I felt) a series of didactic yet meaningless speeches of varying length, none of which lent itself to illustrating any particular point. But afterwards I found myself laughing, because I realised he was not so much unforthcoming as bordering on the Delphic. He is – unbudgingly, impenetrably, but nevertheless magnificently – a character of his own making.

In his movies the characters who talk like this – a sort of scattershot guru-speak, in which sayings are either wise or total rubbish, depending on what sticks – are fortune-tellers, random ciphers or mysterious orchestrators of strange plots (the dancing dwarf in Twin Peaks, the Cowboy in Mulholland Drive, the witchy neighbour in Inland Empire). In other words, the most unnatural among the dramatis personae. But when you listen to Lynch you realise they are (in their delivery at least) the most natural, the most like him.

Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana in 1946, and brought up in various places around the US, depending on where his father's job as a research scientist for the Department of Agriculture took him.

"I think his happiest time," Lynch says of his dad, "was when he had the Boise National Experimental Forest. A whole forest to experiment with! Things like erosion, bugs – so many different kinds of bugs – disease … And I loved going into that wood. There were little stands with little houses on the stands, and you'd open up the door and there'd be all kinds of weather equipment in there – little read-outs. It was really kind of great."

If there are two things from Lynch's childhood that have continued to influence him, it's experimentation with organic phenomena and the strangely polarised era that was the 1950s. He loved the jitterbug, the big cars, the picket fences and the sound of planes flying overhead – a child's view of an idyllic time. But the 50s were also about appearances: this very idyll masked warring agendas – things people refused to know and other, often incorrect, things they insisted on knowing.

"All the problems were there," he once explained, referring at least to the atomic bomb, and probably to McCarthy, "but it was somehow glossed over. And then the gloss broke, or rotted, and it all came oozing out." In a now-famous quote published in Lynch on Lynch, he explained that he'd grown up in "middle America as it's supposed to be. But on the cherry tree there's this pitch oozing out – some black, some yellow, and millions of red ants crawling all over it. I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there are always red ants underneath."

The reason this has been quoted so often is that it seems an apt distillation of Lynch's imagination – a version in words of the unforgettable image in Blue Velvet of a perfect lawn leading to a severed ear and the insect-ridden earth. For those seeking weirdness in Lynch's life, it's almost a relief to hear that he once asked a vet for a cat's corpse so he could dissect it ( just out of interest), or that he once owned a pickled uterus. But if you understand him as the son of a scientist and a housewife called Sunny, as an experimenter as well as a dreamy fi lmmaker, none of this really seems odd.

The shorthand for Lynch's interest in things is "nerdy" – whether it's cameras, music, weather or the effects of transcendental meditation, which he has been practising twice a day since 1974. But he could be thought of more as an old-fashioned natural philosopher – someone for whom dissection, technology and the unconscious all exist on a single plane of curiosity. When I ask him whether he has visited Thomas Edison's factory, thinking this would be up his photographic street, he replies immediately: "No. I don't like Thomas Edison. I'm a fan of Nicolai Tesla," fervently taking sides about these two 19th-century inventors as if they were contemporary politicians.

In 1967, Lynch was a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He had made a painting and he wanted to "see it move". So he projected a one-minute animation onto a sculptured screen and added a siren soundtrack on a loop. The result, Six Men Getting Sick – which was shot on reversal film so has no negative – is mesmerising. Painted heads grow tubes, exposed stomachs and random hands; an x-ray of a torso is added; the ground changes from white to black to red to purple, and fountains of white paint emerge from the heads and spatter the canvas.

It was his next short film, The Alphabet, that gave him "the bug". Then he made a 34-minute film based on a dense, eight-page script (The Grandmother), and by the time he came to shoot Eraserhead, which took four years and became at one point Stanley Kubrick 's favourite film, Lynch had settled on the convoluted logic of a lifetime. The oozing mechanical chickens, the slimy foetal offspring, performing ladies in steaming radiators, dissolving beds, electric hair, a severed head. Even the theatrical, curtained room with a black and white floor – a signature in Twin Peaks – was already there.

Many consider Blue Velvet his greatest picture (he had made the classical Elephant Man by then and the sci-fi curio Dune); others prefer Wild at Heart or the Twin Peaks series, which was justifiably cultish. Lost Highway has fewer fans, and The Straight Story, a faithfully linear narrative, was considered un-Lynchian.

But Mulholland Drive, which so divided critics that serious public rows were had over the film's meaning, is a work of sheer genius. It's like a Lynch movie about a Lynch movie – dream logic imposed onto dream logic, with many of his favourite themes reshuffled to create a new order in homage to Hollywood. Yet it's possible that, having disassembled the grammar of cinema so fruitfully, he has committed – perhaps condemned – his films to be forever broken down, re-syntaxed.

Mulholland Drive was originally made as a pilot for a TV series, like Twin Peaks. But the ABC executive who was to decide whether or not to commission it watched the pilot at six in the morning while having a coffee and making some phone calls. He turned it down. Lynch eventually made it as a film, of course, but years later, inspired by the intuitive way he'd worked on Mulholland Drive, he dived into Inland Empire, which stars Laura Dern, Justin Theroux and Jeremy Irons, shooting it "scene by scene, not knowing". The Lynch documentary observes him mid-experiment. At one point he says: "I'm so depressed I don't know what I'm doing." The result was, in his own description, "the kiss of death for a distributor".

I ask him if he ever worries that he won't get funding.

"No," he smiles benignly, "I don't care." Then he explains: "See, a painting is much cheaper than making a film. And photography is, you know, way cheap. So if I get an idea for a film, there are many ways to get it together and go realise that film. There's really nothing to be afraid of."

Is there a future in filmmaking that's funded differently, I wonder?

Lynch says it's distribution that's difficult. "Now there's the internet, you can distribute anything. The problem is, how do you get money for it? … It's gonna be very tough, coming up."

Are you in touch with a younger generation of filmmakers? I ask.

Lynch smiles. "No, I'm not in touch with an older generation! ... People think in Hollywood there's a family, where everybody gets together talks about stuff and we all know each other, and it's just not that way at all to me."

"How is it to you?"

"I like to work, so how it is, is work."

"But you meet people in the evenings, presumably?"

Lynch laughs and splutters at the thought. "I don't meet anybody! How would you meet anyone? – you gotta go out. Where are you gonna go?"

Lynch has a gratifyingly wicked sense of humour. It comes on slowly, then pans out into a big, boyish smile.

As it happens, Lynch doesn't seem to have a problem meeting new people. Last week, he got married for the fourth time – to a 26-year-old actress named Emily Stofle, who appeared without many clothes in Inland Empire. (Lynch's long-time composer-collaborator Angelo Badalamenti calls me from Beverly Hills on Friday morning, after "a late night of lots of champagne".) I'm not the first to wonder how someone who is so evangelically "blissed out" can live through the un-bliss of three divorces (he has a child from each marriage) and a well-publicised break up with Isabella Rossellini. To this Lynch will only say: "We live in the field of relativity. Things change."

On the subject of bliss, though, I inquire about the David Lynch Foundation, founded in July 2005 , which aims to spread the teaching of transcendental meditation in schools – encouraging, by extension, world peace. (The so-called "Maharishi effect" decrees that if the square root of 1% of any population practises transcendental meditation, it will produce measurable improvements in the quality of life, "thus creating sustainable world peace".)

"It's having incredible success," Lynch says proudly. There are now 20 schools – some of them once the worst in their state – that practise TM as a school twice a day. "The teachers say: Billy now is focusing. The students are sleeping better at night, they've got way more energy, they start liking themselves."

In contrast to many other things, "diving within" – or the "unbounded, infinite, eternal, immutable, immortal level" of experience – is a subject about which Lynch could speak forever. "Before I started, I thought maybe it was some kind of mind control," he admits. But when he was given his mantra and began, "It was as if I was in an elevator and somebody had cut the cable. Pooooookkkhhh! Into the thickest, most beautiful bliss ever. And I said: 'Where has this experience in life been?'"

"How young can you start?" I ask. Lynch's assistant has told us it's time to stop and we're getting up from our seats.

"You can get your walking mantra when you're old enough to keep a secret," he says, adding, "Five or six."

I'm not sure I'm old enough to keep a secret now, I mutter.

Lynch seems mildly amused. "You're old enough."

He shakes my hand and smiles that neighbourly smile. But he doesn't say "Goodbye" or "Nice to meet you." Instead, in a tone that suggests both a father in a 1950s TV series and an otherworldly being who may know more than you care to contemplate, he says: "Stay outta trouble, Gaby."

They're the films chosen by filmmaker David Lynch for a special sidebar of AFI Fest 2010, which runs from Nov. 4 to 11. Lynch, director of "Blue Velvet, "Mulholland Drive" and "Inland Empire," is the festival's first-ever guest artistic director and himself an American Film Institute alumnus.

In addition to the eclectic and unusual group of titles unveiled by Lynch on Monday, the sidebar also will include his debut feature, "Eraserhead," begun while he was at AFI and first released in 1976.

"I love AFI. I owe them a lot, so much I can't tell you," Lynch said in a phone interview from his office in Los Angeles. "I was living in Philadelphia, and I didn't see the brightest future for myself. I applied for an independent filmmaker grant in 1968, and I won that, and it changed my life. AFI is a very, very important institution. I love supporting it."

Announcing Lynch's appointment this summer as the guest artistic director, Bob Gazzale, president and chief executive of the American Film Institute, called the director "an artist who embodies the institute's national mandate to both educate the next generation and to honor the masters."

Speaking about his selections, Lynch said, "When I was at AFI, they ran a lot of great pictures, and I got a chance to see some things that I probably wouldn't have been able to see. It was a place that was full of inspiration." As to what might tie these particular films together, he said, "There's no theme; they're just films that I happen to love."

Although Lynch has often veered toward the abstract and hard to define in his own work, he also has shown an appreciation for the genre structures of classical Hollywood filmmaking, transforming the crime thriller, the melodrama and the romance to his own ends. Among his selections are two films that likewise bend the rules of classic Hollywood, "Sunset Boulevard" and "Rear Window."

"Those films I just love," he said. "I loved being in that world. You know, a lot of cinema is a sense of place, to create a world. Billy Wilder was just a master at that, as were the directors of the other films I picked."

The Kubrick film that Lynch has chosen is comparatively overlooked next to such unassailably important works such as "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb."

As for "Lolita," Lynch said, "James Mason, Peter Sellers, Shelley Winters and Sue Lyon, they are just great performances. It's a time and a place and a sensibility. That thrills my soul."

Lynch himself is scheduled to appear at the festival on Nov. 6 to present a double bill of "Eraserhead" and "Sunset Boulevard." He has prepared video introductions for the screenings in his program he will not attend. Lynch also created the artwork that appears on this year's festival poster, an image of a clay figure floating amid the Los Angeles skyline.

"I always say a film festival is more than a chance to see films; it's a celebration of film," Lynch said. "There's always surprises that get people going. It's real exciting.

Here’s David Lynch’s recipe for success, taken from his inspiring little manual Catching the Big Fish: “Try to get a job that gives you some time; get your sleep and a little bit of food; and work as much as you can. There’s so much enjoyment in doing what you love.”This philosophy, plus a healthy helping of Transcendental Meditation, of which he remains a vocal advocate, allowed Lynch to become an intriguing visual artist, with works in painting, collage, cartooning, photography and art-film. Later, this approach helped him make the mysterious jump into Hollywood filmmaking, where he remains one of the few working heirs to the great surrealist auteurs of cinema.

And it’s a philosophy that Lynch is now applying with renewed focus to yet another art form: music. Anyone familiar with his film work has long figured out that Lynch is a genuine sound freak: Witness the uncanny industrial soundscapes of Eraserhead, the unforgettable aural stampede that elevates The Elephant Man, his 180-degree redefinition of Bobby Vinton and Roy Orbison in Blue Velvet, the groundbreaking romanticism of the Twin Peaks score, the jagged, deranged edges of Lost Highway and, especially, his covert beatnik musical Wild at Heart. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to say he possesses the keenest ears among all major living Hollywood directors.

Lynch soon will be relaunching his website, davidlynch.com, as a way to broadcast the result of a series of musical collaborations (or “combos,” as he likes to call them) with other artists, under the supervision of his personal engineer and main partner in sound, Dean Hurley, at the filmmaker’s pro-level home studio, Asymmetrical Studio.

Hurley says the website “will feature unreleased singles, experiments and instrumentals created through the years,” including the legendary Thought Gang project, a full album of noir avant-jazz recorded alongside the Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me soundtrack by Lynch and longtime associate Angelo Badalamenti.

We met Lynch for a conversation about his music at his luminous homebase/art studio in the Hollywood Hills. (The italics below are an attempt to convey Lynch’s distinctive manner of speaking, an infectious way to share his enthusiasm. In Lynch’s world, some things are not just great, they’re “really, really, really great.”)

DAVID LYNCH: I’m not a musician, but I play music. So it’s a strange thing. I just saw this biography on the Bee Gees and it was so thrilling. The Bee Gees have this strange reputation of doing disco, but they are great musicians and writers. Unbelievable stuff and since they were little — music just solid in them. Just nonstop. I was so impressed. It was incredible. And I saw some videos recently of Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits. Unbel … I didn’t know what a guitar player this guy is, but killer. My son is a guitar player, really good. So we were watching [ERROR: No URL was passed to the generic video BBCode] “Comfortably Numb,” Pink Floyd, and it was in some arena. They had a theatrical thing set up. It was unbelievably beautiful, so powerful.

L.A. WEEKLY: Have you ever seen them live?

No, I’ve never seen Pink Floyd live.

Do you ever go to big shows?

I went to see ZZ Top in an arena in L.A. somewhere. I love ZZ Top. I don’t go to too many shows. I’m gonna go see Lissie [who performed Jan. 15 at Hollywood's Music Box at the Fonda]. I’ve been traveling with Donovan, so I’ve been to his shows. I went to see Ringo at the Hard Rock Café a couple of months ago.

How do you choose what you go see?

I don’t like to leave the house too much. I mean, you can get lost, there’s so much good stuff going on.

How does music reach you nowadays? Do you have friends who recommend it to you? Do musicians send it to you?

[Pulls out a bunch of CD-Rs from his jacket pocket.] Both. I don’t know who these people are. [Displays a CD-R marked "Deerhunter"] Let’s see. Do you know Deerhunter?

Yes.

Somebody sent me that. [Reads CD labels.] Casino vs. Japan, Night on Tape. And then I got Moby’s new album.

Are you friends with him?

Yeah. Yeah. I’m friends with Moby.

Did you know his music before you became friends?

Yeah. Yeah. He sort of started out doing a remix of Twin Peaks [Moby's 1991 single "Go" samples "Laura Palmer's Theme"]. So I would hear about Moby, but I never met him. I thought he was British ’cause he was so big in England, I just assumed he was English, and then I met Moby a couple of years ago in London. I thought Moby was solid electronics. But Moby is a killer guitar player, and his acoustic sets are really, really, really great. And he played with [his band] Little Death, [featuring singer] Laura Dawn, and her husband, I think, and the drummer is unbelievable, bass player is unbelievable. When they play live it’s incredible, but when they record it, it’s not the same power. Do you know that phenomenon? That’s a real shame. It’s like the difference between. … Some live things, they cannot capture that, even to this day, on the digital thing or whatever.

In your musical and film experience, what was the closest you ever came to capturing the power of live music? You got some fantastic atmospherics in the album Lux Vivens, the Hildegard von Bingen medieval-chant project you produced for Jocelyn Montgomery in 1998.

That’s Jocelyn West, [then she was] Jocelyn Montgomery, she married Monty Montgomery [celebrated Hollywood indie producer for Lynch and others and the mysterious Cowboy in Mulholland Drive], and then they got divorced. Jocelyn is an incredible singer. We’re gonna have a song by Jocelyn on the new site. Monty is a producer and he was one of the producers of Wild at Heart. They had a place called Propaganda Films here in L.A. I was in New York working with Angelo, and I don’t remember what we were working on, but we were in Artie Polemis’ studio in New York, tiny little studio on Eighth Avenue, but it was like going back in time, like going back in time to Eastern Europe. It was the weirdest little studio. But it was so beautiful in there, so great. It’s gone now.So Monty called and he said he wanted me to meet this girl Jocelyn, who was coming to New York on her way to L.A. Well, it just so happened we had this extra track we made, and we wrote this kind of melody. Me and Angelo. And Artie’s wife, Estelle, in the ’60s was a really great lyricist, and she was there that day sitting on the couch, and I would write a line, then give the paper over to Estelle, she would write the next line, hand it back to me, I would write the third line and like that; in about 15 minutes we wrote this song. It’s called “And Still.” It’s never been out, but it’s in a documentary my friend Toby made on the making of Lost Highway.So Jocelyn shows up and she was supposed to say hello and then leave, but I said, “Jocelyn, we got this song. Would you stay here and sing it?” And she said yes. And she also brought her violin. So it’s beautiful what she did. And she sang and played the fiddle in this and it’s a haunting, beautiful song.

Then remembering all that, Jocelyn, while floating down the Rhine River, or the Blue Danube, or I don’t know, something, with her friend Heidrun [Reshöft] — now Heidrun is another special person — they went down the river, visiting monasteries, thinking only of Hildegard. And people would let them stay in the monasteries and Jocelyn would sing for the nuns in the morning. So beautiful she sang that many of the nuns were weeping. Imagine!

So they got this deal to make an album of Hildegard music, and that’s the first thing we made in the studio downstairs [at Asymmetrical]. The very first thing. And I got to produce it and that was really, really fun.

The chants have this eerie, hazy, quiet feel reminiscent of yours and Badalamenti’s influential work on the Twin Peaks score and your productions for the work of Julee Cruise. But your Blue Bob album [a Lynch obscurity from 2001], the very recent single “I Know” and your contributions to the Danger Mouse/Sparklehorse collaboration Dark Night of the Soul seem to come straight out of “Up in Flames,” the scorching track you produced for blues legend Koko Taylor for the Wild at Heart soundtrack. To me, that track marks a before-and-after in your sound.

[Smiles] Yes. Combos is a magic thing. Combos. You put person A with person B, they’re separate, but when together, they would do a certain thing. And then you put person A with person C, and another thing emerges that couldn’t emerge with A and B. There’s a magic in combos, who you’re working with, and a certain thing emerges. It feels really good.

You know, the blues [chuckles]. This is, to me, real, real, real beautiful. But … and it has a form, and it’s traditional, but I like the idea of some kind of “modern blues.” Just kind of … breaking that. I don’t know if you can break it, really, but … “modern blues”! I just like that idea. And I like the feeling it makes, and it marries in my mind with the smokestack industry, and so I’ve always loved factories and fire and smoke and electricity, and I think some music goes with that so powerfully well, and I think its home is real close to the blues. But I don’t know exactly.

Did you get a feeling “Up in Flames” was a turning point? Because the Twin Peaks score is kind of ethereal.

Yeah, angelic, yeah. Every song wants to be a certain way. With Koko Taylor, the players on that got so into it. Angelo and I wrote it, but then we recorded it here in L.A. I think it was right down on Sunset. And Nicolas Cage had been working with a guy … I think it was not the original guitar player for Elvis but the later guitar player for Elvis. And there was a guy who was Elvis. I mean this guy was, I don’t know if you’d say an Elvis impersonator, but this guy was working with Nic, but Nic just got it, man. Those Elvis songs on Wild at Heart were really great. Nic Cage: really great.

If you go to some karaoke places nowadays, people sing “Love Me” not like Elvis but like Nicolas Cage in Wild at Heart.

Oh, yeah? [laughs] Wow, that’s really good.

It’s a strange tribute.

Strange trip, yeah.

So, we recorded “Up in Flames” in the same place, I think. And the players were so good. Especially the guitar player on “Up in Flames” was just dive-bombin’, you know, dropping bombs, and it was really, really, really good. And Koko Taylor [makes a sublime face]. She was like a … you know, she’s the real thing.

Did you listen to a lot of blues music growing up?

No. I came later to it. I’ve loved music always and my music fire was lit by Elvis Presley, really, and all that was happening back then. And I always say the same thing: That music that was born out of a combo of many things was so special and then Elvis went into the Army, so what was started … it’s strange.

I think it was like this tremendous explosion, white-hot, it was so hot when it happened. Instead of just raging forward, it burned, but it kind of went down a little bit, and it kind of got lost in people being — I don’t know, I’m just making things up — being quite not so sure, and other things kinda were still there and this kind of real, real rock & roll kinda got lost a little bit. The fire went down.

The power … I think people have got it, for sure, but there was something happening there that was real, real, real special and hard to match.

Isn’t that the same argument punk rock made when it appeared in the mid- to late ’70s? “Rock got too proggy, theatrical, and we’re gonna bring back the fire of ’56.” Do you remember that happening?

Yeah, yeah. But it wasn’t … it was loud and it’s like a thing. It set a time. Punk set a time. And I know they were trying to get there and there was some great stuff done, but it wasn’t … rock & roll is like … [long pause] It’s not just loud, and it’s not just a beat. There’s something. And to find it you would look at Gene Vincent, and Elvis Presley, and those guys, and even Roy Orbison, Everly Brothers, ["Come Softly to Me" vocal group the] Fleetwoods. … These people, it could make you cry, and it could make you, you know, wild at the same time. There’s a mixture. I don’t know what it is, but it was there and it kind of dissipated a little bit, I think.

Brian Eno is also a huge fan of the sounds of his childhood, and he’s mentioned the Fleetwoods as a reference for his music. [Side note: On the mixing desk of Lynch's Asymmetrical Studio, there's a box of Eno's "Oblique Strategies" cards.] Your music projects and Eno’s both sound very distant from the Fleetwoods. Do you think you want to recapture that lost childhood sound?

It might not be possible. Because I think every time — some people would say, “You listen to ’50s music, you can feel the time of the ’50s, you listen to 1930s music, even if you didn’t live in the ’30s, you can feel the time, so you just listen to it and you’re back in time, makes a picture come, from that time.” But the time played a huge part in making that music, you know what I mean?As the time changes, it would produce different music, so I don’t know if you can ever go back, if you can ever make something from a different time and make it real.

You can get the aura, and the chords, and the phrasing, but the hardest thing to reproduce is pure sound.That’s a big, important thing. [Film is] “sound and picture flowing together, in time.” Music deals with time and timing. It’s so magical, but when you get into it, every little sound and every little space between the sounds, it’s critical, so critical. And if it’s not there, it not only feels wrong but it ruins things. So you work and work and work to get a thing to feel correct, in sound and how it goes and in picture. It doesn’t mean you’re gonna hit 100 percent, but you work so hard to get it to feel correct.

What’s your earliest sound memory — not music, but the earliest sound you can remember?

[Long pause] Well … in Spokane, Washington, and I never picture this in my mind. … [pause] Well, I’ll tell you what I picture: It’s a summer day. The sky is, Spokane, Washington, is northwest. And Spokane, Washington, is eastern Washington, so it’s not moist. … It’s the most refreshing summer day, clear as a bell, and refreshing feel, refreshing. Beautiful sunlight. Incredible. The smell of Ponderosa pines in the air. The grass is green, the sky is blue, and in the sky were these big, really big bomber planes. And they were propeller planes, so they moved across the sky very slowly and they made a drone that was incredibly beautiful. It took a long time for them to go across, so always this drone is going. That’s a beautiful sound.

Have you ever tried to recapture it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that drone is what I’ve been trying to get and it’s probably appeared in different places. The first, kind of “whoa” thing in recording was in my second [short] film. Well, I had a siren going continuously, a loop, on my first film, so there was sound from the beginning, but the second film, The Alphabet, and I rented a recorder from this film lab in Philadelphia, and unbeknownst to me it was broken, but what a blessing that it was broken, because it was distorting everything I recorded. And that was the beginning of “the happy accident.” Happy accidents are real gifts and they can open the door to a future that didn’t even exist. It’s kind of nice sometimes to set up something to encourage or allow happy accidents to happen.

A fairly recent happy accident is the series of projects with classically trained Polish musicians related to the Inland Empire soundtrack you composed.

With “Polish Poem” I worked with singer Chrysta Bell. Next year at some point we’ll release her album, which I got to produce and write with her. She’s really great.

Polish Night Music is me and Marek Zebrowski, who is a superaccomplished concert pianist and composer. Marek and I met in Poland through the Camerimage film festival. Those guys are a great, great, great gang, and they’ve become real good friends.Marek and I started doing these experiments, where I would write a kind of a scene or a poem thing, and I would then show this thing to Marek, he would read it, and we’d both have keyboards, so we’d try to play the poem. I’d start doing something and Marek has perfect pitch, so whatever I’d play, it’s as if it’s written and he’s just playing on top of it, perfectly. Because I can play pretty much everything, and he, you know, would pick up on it and elaborate it on top. So it’s a great experiment for mood things.

That material is very different from the single with the songs “Good Day Today” and “I Know,” and from the long-delayed Thought Gang project.

Yes — Dean and I did the single. One of them is dance, the other is more like a “modern blues” thing. What Dean and I mostly do is in the modern-blues thing.

The Thought Gang album will come out this year sometime. We started it in the early ’90s and it just sat there for a long, long, long time and now it’s kinda gonna get tweaked and finally put out. Thought Gang is … now, you know Don Van Vliet just died. …Captain Beefheart?

Yes.

Not that Thought Gang is “Don Van Vliet.” He was beyond, beyond … special [chuckles]. I bought Trout Mask Replica [when it came out] and then I was in a documentary on Don Van Vliet. These Germans came to me. … I guess the Germans picked up on Don Van Vliet. This was in the late ’80s or early ’90s, and then I got the great opportunity to talk to him on the phone, several times, and he was so great to talk to.

He was really in his own world, but then when I was talking to him he was a painter, he’d stopped making music. And he’s a great painter, great painter. So, Thought Gang, I’m saying, [laughs] would probably sell fewer albums than Don Van Vliet [laughs].

Don Van Vliet’s collaborator Gary Lucas said one of the reasons Beefheart went into painting was because he was disappointed that more people didn’t buy his music.

[Laughs] I think it’s something to do with, ummm, the time and the place. … I picture the desert playing a role, and that hot sun, and a certain thing creeps in. … And it colors what comes out. So, I love the idea that Don Van Vliet thought that his music would be popular, but it’s so his own thing, it’s so far away from what people were buying.

And yet you yourself did manage to achieve all kinds of success with film and, to a certain extent, music. You’ve followed a similar uncompromising, strange path, and you are quite popular.

Yes, but I always say, you take George Lucas or Spielberg: They’re doing, in my mind, what they truly love. But what they truly love, zillions of people love, so they’re multimillionaires. I’m doing what I truly love, but the audience is way smaller. And Don Van Vliet was doing what he truly loved and the audience is hardly there at all. But it’s OK, because if you do anything that you don’t love for money or fame, you die. You can’t live doing that. It’s hollow. It’s a joke. So be thankful you’re able to do what you love. Don Van Vliet, when I talked to him, was a painter. And we would talk about painting. We would not talk about music at all.

Do you have any of his paintings?

No — I wish!

When the Inland Empire soundtrack came out, people were wondering why instead of Angelo Badalamenti doing it, it was credited just to you. Were you trying to be your own Badalamenti?

Angelo lives in New Jersey. And I always say, if Angelo lived next door to me, we’d be making a lot of music, but he lives in New Jersey and so in Inland Empire it just grew in a different way, so Angelo wasn’t a part of it. But that’s not to say the next one … I’d probably work with Angelo.

When Badalamenti scores movies for other people, his soundtracks are so different from what he does when he works with you.

Because it’s a combo. It’s a combo. Angelo would bring some things out of me that would never be brought out, I’d bring some things out of Angelo that would never be brought out. And you feed off each other. And a thing gets born that is the particular result of those two or three or four. It’s magic. There’s so much magic in music. It’s incredible. What gets born and how come it gets born. And so, so, so beautiful.

If I sit down with Angelo, it’s always just … a magical mystery tour. It can start anywhere. It’s always the same: I’d start talking and Angelo plays what I talk and if I don’t like it, if it’s not really happening, I change the words and the music changes, and before you know it, something gets caught. It just happens.

You’re describing studio performances. Have you done live performances?

No, no, no. I have one time, but it’s a nightmare. I can play something one time, but since I’m not a musician, to play it a second time, that’s the trick. That’s why I love to jam. In jamming there’s possibilities for discovery. It’s done in freedom, there’s nobody else around. It’s me and Dean now, just jamming, and out of that comes, you know, what comes. And it may be 98 percent absolute garbage, but 2 percent is something that can be elaborated on. That 2 percent is worth days of jamming.

Do you collect music?

I do, but I’m not like “a collector.” It just happens. These things I showed you [pulls the CD-Rs from his jacket], I’m gonna listen to these. But I don’t have time to listen to a lot of … I listen to KCRW. I listen to “Morning Becomes Eclectic,” on weekends I listen to Anne Litt, and sometimes at night I listen, too.

Do you have your old records?

They’re in storage next door, but I’m gonna get the turntable out, because Dean played me a 45 and it hit me like a truck. I don’t know what the words are to say it, but it’s smoother, it’s friendlier, it’s warmer. Do you listen to records every day?

Yes, absolutely.

Wow, fantastic. You know, my roommate at the Boston Museum School was Peter Wolf. I didn’t know, and of course he didn’t know, he was going to be in the J. Geils Band. He was supposed to be a painter, but he never painted! And it really pissed me off, so the first day he moved in, that night we went with a friend with his pickup truck and drove from Boston to New York, specifically to get his record collection, which he brought up. Filled the whole pickup.

And this guy would play me, like [in sped-up beatnik voice], “Oh, David, you gotta listen to this man, you gotta dig this,” and he’d play 10 seconds of Thelonious Monk or 10 seconds of Miles Davis or whatever, like he was, he wasn’t on speed, but it was like he was, so he was totally into it. Music was his thing. He knows music. He’s another bluesman, I think. But he wasn’t into blues back then, he was into jazz, modern jazz. But if you’d told me, “This guy is gonna go into music,” I’d go, “Hello! Of course he is.”

Does Los Angeles inspire your music in any way?

A place, definitely. Like painting. I would paint sometimes in Madison, Wis., my paintings were different. The place and the light: That’s why I love L.A. The light in Los Angeles, even the winter light. People come here and can’t believe it. That’s what happened to me. I couldn’t believe the light. It was so important. And it feeds into the music.

Do you drive?

I don’t leave the house too much, but I do drive, and I have a Scion. It’s like a box. I love this car.

What do you listen to while you drive?

I don’t know how to run the thing. It used to be you turned a knob, and you got music. I don’t know how to run it. After they added the GPS thing and the radio is part of that, I don’t know how to run it. And since I don’t go out that much, every time, I have to get someone to teach me. It’s really horrible. I’d like to get rid of that thing, now that you’re bringing it up!

So you drive quietly down Mulholland Drive?

I drive quietly. It’s so important to have a good radio in the car, though. I’m gonna get rid of that thing and get one.

-Gustavo Turner, (Originally printed in the January 21-27 printed edition of The L.A. Weekly)

good interview.. wish he'd asked at least one question about his next movie, but good that he went so in depth about his musical life, which mostly i have no idea about.

because no one is going to read it i'll summarize: he thought moby was british.. he drives a scion.. he talks about captain beefheart and meeting him after he stopped making music, so if you like that crap you might want to read that part.. not much else oh yeah great section about the first sound he remembers, some drone from huge planes flying overhead when he was a kid.

David Lynch: 'Watching movies on a smartphone is pathetic'Source: Digital Spy

David Lynch has voiced his dislike for the modern trend of watching movies on smartphones and portable devices.

The legendary Blue Velvet director, who will release his new studio album The Big Dream on July 15, opened up about the state of cinema in an interview with The New Review for this week's Independent on Sunday.

Lynch stated his belief that modern technology is damaging the filmgoing experience.

"If you have a chance to enter another world, then you need a big picture in a dark room with great sound," he said.

"It's a spiritual, magic experience. If you have the same movie on a little computer screen with bad sound - and this is the way people are seeing films now - it's such a shame. It's a shameful, shameful thing. It's so pathetic."

Lynch also cast doubt on the prospect of him making another movie, saying that he felt more drawn towards the creativity in display on cable TV.

"It's a very depressing picture," he commented. "With alternative cinema - any sort of cinema that isn't mainstream - you're fresh out of luck in terms of getting theatre space and having people come to see it.

"Even if I had a big idea, the world is different now. Unfortunately, my ideas are not what you'd call commercial, and money really drives the boat these days.

"So I don't know what my future is. I don't have a clue what I'm going to be able to do in the world of cinema.

"And television is way more interesting than cinema now. It seems like the art-house has gone to cable."

Logged

“Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.” - Andy Warhol

Dude, what happened? I thought IE was all about showing how anyone could make a movie nowadays. This defeatist attitude is really depressing to me. I guess there's a glimmer of hope in that he's not discounting the prospect of doing something in TV. Shame he's not more focused on exploring the idea of same medium/different delivery though.